FISD Finalizes Global Committee Membership

LONDON--The Financial Information Services Division (FISD), part of the Information Industry Association (IIA), finalized its executive committee at its meeting last week, completing its transformation into a truly global organization.

Mike Atkin, vice president, financial information markets for the IIA, says "the influence of the European contingent has brought changes in our structure, tenor and approach--all, in my mind, throwing an extremely positive light on our objective to be truly global."

Three core groups are represented in the committee: exchanges, market data vendors and users, with both sides of the Atlantic getting a voice. The eight exchanges are Amex, CME, DTB, LSE, Nasdaq, NIMEX, NYSE and SBF Paris. Vendors are comprised of representatives of Bridge, Reuters, Bloomberg, Datastream/ICV, FT Information, ILX, S&P Comstock and Telekurs. Users find voice from Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, UBS AG, PaineWebber, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Wellington Management and Salomon Smith Barney. The chair of each special interest user group is stated first, with vice-chair second in each group. Chairman is Dan Rooney from the CBOT. In order to ensure continuity on the committee, half of the aforementioned committee members will serve until the end of 1999 with the other half carrying on until the end of 2000.

The committee aims to resolve an ongoing series of issues surrounding the market data industry and come up with industry-wide recommendations on best practice. The FISD endeavours, through special interest committee groups who identify their own particular issues, to move to achieve a consensus among the three groups. This approach ensures, says Atkin, that recommended best practices for the industry carry industry-wide legitimacy.

FISD issue areas completed at last week's conference were the audit code of practice as well as the completion of the data feed questionnaire (dfq). "Part of the contract administration issue area, the audit code of practice intends to promote fair, reasonable and consistent practices which members of the financial information industry can exercise contractual audit rights and obligations," according to FISD's literature.

Datafeed administration represents a core issue for FISD members. "[The dfq] is already in use by the industry, ensuring a myriad of approaches is foregone," says Atkin, "This means the control of data feed information is now in a common format and approved by consensus."

FISD's datafeed administration agenda focuses on the impact of open networks and the problems associated with tracking and reporting usage of market data delivered via digital datafeed. The dfq has been designed as a global model uniform document and identifies how firms use market data and the technical systems and administrative procedures in place to manage market data and reporting. Datafeed access contracts look set to be on the agenda for the next meet. Members are looking to complete the "guidelines covering the business requirements associated with the completion and use of "honesty statements."

Other agenda items for the next meeting are likely to be model contracts and the concept of unit of count. The model exchange contract will provide a much needed clear structure that accommodates each exchange's pricing policy as well as providing a common basis for negotiation between vendors and exchanges.

The unit of count has long been the bane of many contract price negotiations. The user committee has already developed a proposed unit of count definition (including device equivalencies) as well as recommendations on how they are to be applied to vendor and exchange contracts. An agreement on such a concept in the near future would hopefully put an end to those painful discussions related to multiple access fees and double billing and would hopefully promote an improved user/vendor entitlement reconciliation process.

The FISD's next meeting for US representatives is July 22-23 in New York. European representatives get their say in London in September.